Of all the political events of this past Tuesday, that which interested me the most was a 6-5 decision by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to allow Home Depot to proceed with its plans to open a store in the Bayview/Hunter’s Point neighbourhood.

The more I read, the more uneasy theory makes me. Abstraction tends to obscure individuality, which tends not only to mask over the most interesting aspects of human behaviour, but also to dehumanise subjects, allowing many kinds of oppression and violence. Thus, a post-modern philosophical blog like Long Sunday tends to make me a little [...]

I’ve been a little gun-shy, these days, when it comes to posting about fieldwork. It progresses, but very slowly. Something crazy, happened last week, though, which has jack-all to do with the lives of the people I’m interviewing, but which might be related to my work:

Worry brings an end to a person in Wood Building.

Kerim Friedman is one of the most prolific and most consistently interesting bloggers in the anthropologosphere. In addition to his personal blog Keywords, Kerim is the founder and prime mover behind Savage Minds: the Internet’s best cultural anthropology blog. (He’s written a little over 40% of Savage Minds’ posts, to date, and despite the fact [...]

Three women died and went to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter asked each what she had died from.
“Cancer,” said the first woman.
“Diabetes,” said the second.
“Gonorrhea,” said the third, a foxy black chick.
“Gonorrhea?” said Saint Peter. “Young people like you don’t die from gonorrhea.”
“When you gives it to a man like Leroy, you does!”
— [...]

‘It was to be drummed into the minds of the people that, for the first time, no free African-American was to dare to lift his or her hand against a “Christian, not being a negro, mulatto or Indian” (3:459); that African-American freeholders were no longer to be allowed to vote (4:133-34); that the provisions of a previous enactment (3:87 [1691]) was being reinforced against the mating of English and Negroes as producing “abominable mixture” and “spurious issue” (3:453-4); that, as provided in the 1723 law for preventing freedom plots by African-American bond-laborers, “any white person… found in company with any [illegally congregated] slaves” was to be fined (along with free African-Americans or Indians so offending) with a fine of fifteen shillings, or to “receive, on his, her, or their bare backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes well laid on.” (4:129)’

I spent this past weekend with Erin and a bunch of radical twenty-somethings up in Anderson Valley — one of the NorCal enclaves where the hippies settled in the diaspora following the Summer of Love. Erin’s former housemate Jade grew up in the woods on a forty-acre plot that her dad purchased back in the [...]

Next Monday’s issue of Time Magazine is running a story entitled “Fast Times in Tehran” by Iranian-American journalist and author Azadeh Moaveni. I don’t speak Farsi, have never been to Iran, and know very little about Iranian culture or history. That said, Moaveni’s article seems like a pretty good human interest story. But here’s what [...]

Doing ethnography in my own backyard is no doubt going to be an awkward affair.